13 posts tagged with "markdown"

In 2004, John Gruber released Markdown with a modest pitch: a text format that is easy to read, easy to write, and converts cleanly to HTML. Twenty years later his side project became the default language of technical documentation — GitHub renders it natively, Stack Overflow is built on it, Obsidian and Notion popularized it, and every major LLM speaks it fluently. The Verge called it "the default language of the AI era."

That last part is the interesting one. Markdown didn't just survive the AI transition — it locked in because of it. This article walks through why, and what it means for how your team should write documentation inside Confluence.

Bold text is one of the most common formatting actions in Confluence — for headings, callouts, and emphasis inside paragraphs. There are two ways to do it: the toolbar button / keyboard shortcut in the standard editor, and Markdown syntax inside Enhanced Markdown for Confluence. This guide covers both, plus the common "why isn't it working" cases.

A block quote sets a passage apart from the surrounding text — usually indented with a left border — to indicate that the words are quoted from another source. Confluence does not have a dedicated "quote block" button, but there are three reliable ways to create one. This guide walks through each and helps you pick the right one.

Developers, technical writers, and data scientists think in Markdown. READMEs, API docs, pull request descriptions, and design specs are all written in it. But Confluence — where most of that knowledge ends up living — has no native Markdown support. Pasting Markdown into the WYSIWYG editor produces broken tables, literal asterisks, and lost formatting. This guide walks through the options so you can pick the right Markdown approach for your team without trial and error.

The scenario every technical team hits: your engineering docs live in Markdown — READMEs, API references, design docs — and they contain diagrams (Mermaid), equations (LaTeX), and code samples. You paste that Markdown into Confluence, and it falls apart. The Mermaid code blocks render as plain text. The LaTeX equations show as raw $...$ syntax. The code blocks lose their syntax highlighting. Confluence's native editor is WYSIWYG, not Markdown, and the import tools treat Markdown as a one-time conversion rather than something you edit live.

Enhanced Markdown for Confluence solves this with a Markdown editor that renders everything inline — Mermaid diagrams, KaTeX and LaTeX math, syntax-highlighted code, and GitHub-flavored tables — with a live split preview. It runs on the Quikdown engine, so all rendering libraries are bundled locally (no external CDN dependencies, which matters for "Runs on Atlassian" compliance). This guide walks through writing Markdown in Confluence with diagrams, math, and code all rendering live.

Developer teams use Confluence differently than marketing or HR. You document APIs, share architecture diagrams, write runbooks, and collaborate on code reviews. The default Confluence editor works, but it wasn't built for technical documentation.

This guide covers the best Confluence apps for developers in 2026, organized by use case. We built several of these apps at NGPILOT, so we'll be transparent about where our apps fit and where competitors offer better solutions.

Many teams have documentation in Markdown format (GitHub READMEs, API docs, developer guides) and need to bring it into Confluence. Confluence doesn't have a native Markdown import feature, but there are three ways to get Markdown content into Confluence pages.

Confluence has a visual table editor, but it's slow for creating structured tables — you need to click to add rows and columns one at a time. If you write documentation in Markdown, you can create tables much faster with Markdown syntax.

This guide shows how to create, format, and edit tables in Confluence using Markdown.

Confluence Markdown support lets developers write documentation in their preferred format. This guide covers how to add Enhanced Markdown to Confluence for raw Markdown editing, WYSIWYG preview, tables, code blocks, and more.

Confluence's built-in editor is strictly WYSIWYG — there is no native Markdown editor. For teams who already write in Markdown (README files, docs repos, pull request descriptions), that means manually reformatting every doc through toolbar buttons, losing time and introducing inconsistencies. Enhanced Markdown for Confluence solves this by embedding a full Markdown editor with live split preview directly inside Confluence — and it renders Mermaid diagrams, KaTeX/LaTeX math, and 190+ code-highlighted languages, all in one macro.

This FAQ answers the questions teams ask most often about writing Markdown in Confluence.